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How Often Should You Contact Your Clients? By salonhowto.com – Call Us Now On 618 9443 9327

How Often Should You Contact Your Clients? By salonhowto.com – Call Us Now On 618 9443 9327

During this week’s tele-seminar with Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle members and salon marketing stars Tracey Orr, Anne Holleley and Rebecca Skehan, one attendee piped up with this very relevant question: can you contact clients TOO often?

I have a rather simplistic approach to this, one that sounds brutal – and frankly, most salon owners are too timid to adopt it – but one that has stood me in very good stead for years in my own businesses:

“Mail to them till they buy… or die”

But to explain: the best sales and marketing minds in the world agree that it’s almost impossible to contact your clients too often. As a rule of thumb, your clients should get at least one ‘touch’ from you every single week of the year.

Sound impossible? Think for a minute. Fifty two touches a year doesn’t mean you’re pitching something to them every single week. A ‘touch’ can be any one of dozens of ‘points of contact’.

Let’s have a look at this in detail, and break it down into bite-sized chunks.

Newsletters: you should be doing no less than one a month. That’s 12 touches in a year. Your newsletter is your ‘Trojan Horse’ – it turns you from being an ‘unwelcome pest’ into a ‘welcome guest’, because it provides a means by which you can make a ‘soft sell’, cloaked in useful/personal/newsy information. It’s not ALL pitch.

(And for those of you who moan “I don’t have the time to do a newsletter every month”, I quote Tracey Orr from this week’s tele-seminar: “Our newsletter without doubt makes us serious money every month.” So, if you’re complaining about lack of time to do a monthly newsletter, what you’re actually saying is that you’re too busy working on the tools to actually make any money.)

Birthday cards: once a year, obviously. But you can include a Gift Voucher.

Client Appreciation Evenings: not every client will come, of course, but you invite ALL of them by mail. Another touch, say four times a year.

Monthly specials: clients want to be alerted to special offers. Another 12 touches.

Email newsletter: again, once a month – or even once a week – and most of the content is taken from your hard copy newsletter, but this one goes to more people. Another 12 touches, minimum.

Special ‘Event’ Driven promotions: You can count more than a dozen of them without trying, eg Mothers Day, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc etc… plus any number of others you can simply invent, eg National Bad Hair Day. Another dozen ‘touches’, or more.

They add up, folks. I haven’t done the sums, but just in the points above, there are probably 40 or 50 ‘touches’.

Here’s the thing: as I told this tele-seminar attendee, if your clients feel they are getting ‘too much’ from you, they will tell you. And very few will actually do that, most will love it.

The crime is NOT sending enough information to your clients. Don’t market timidly for fear of upsetting one or two of the masses. Market aggressively up to the point – but not beyond – where you pee everybody off. And only THEN back it off a little:-)